Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Not Blogging for fun and profit

Blah, blah, blah, recruiters, blah, blah, Windows 8, blah,
blah politics. Insert a few philosophical
musings and the occasional commentary on a Podcast and you have most of the
content found within the Digital Dynamic blog.

I never claimed this blog was interesting and true to its
credo it is a bit rambling.

Still, after doing it for over a year and resisting the urge
to regurgitate a largely uninspiring life's experiences onto the page I thought
I'd be doing a little better by now.

So I set out on a journey of discovery in search of SEO
optimization and higher page hits.

It doesn't take long to find sage advice about successful
blogging from the SEO marketing crowd.

They admonish me to...

Provide value! (subjective term)

Focus your content! (oops..)

Don't be boring! (VERY Subjective term)

Too much text is bad! (People like pictures)

Be consistent! (That
I can do...)

Don't be wishy-washy...

but don't offend anyone either. (Like that's possible)

After sifting through hundreds of "How-to"
articles and videos I come to the same
conclusion I had when I started my little trip through self-help a la' Google.

It's all crap...

I feel simultaneously enlightened and hollow at the same
time. The presentation, always dazzling
yet the value debatable. Strange, since
that breaks the guru's first rule of not having crap content. Worse it's all the same information which
breaks another rule of successful blogging.
That is, don't do what's already been done.

Read down the page and you're sure to find glowing accolades
in the comments from dozens who've seemingly experienced an epiphany in 250
words.

Of course it's all very generic which makes me wonder if
there's some bulk commentary wholesaler out there where you can buy warm
fuzzies by the score. I swear I've seen
the same comments spread across dozens of blogs. Are people really that unimaginative? Explains why their blogs aren't doing so well
I suppose...

Just like those late
night infomercials with B-list celebrities hawking the promise of easy millions
from becoming a slumlord, I'm convinced the only people enjoying success are
the guru's themselves.

Technically they're not lying, they got me to look at their
stuff but just because I watch a commercial doesn't mean I'm buying the
product.

In this day of website paywalls standing between you and the last sentence of
a newspaper article it seems information, useful or not, is another commodity
to be traded.

I'd like to think that I provided content people were
interested in but my numbers say otherwise.
How could I possibly compete with paid reviews of the latest gizmo or
celebrity gossip.

I may be boring but at least I try to be honest with the
handful of readers who frequent my work.

Maybe someday if the masses tire of the deluge diatribe
they'll go looking for something different.
I just hope I have the right SEO in place when it happens!